The Bricklayer's Crooked Line: On the Unexpected Geometry of Building a First Audience

Before any talk of algorithms or launch sequences, my first audience was a wall. More precisely, it was a single, slightly crooked line of bricks I had laid in my father’s backyard, the mortar oozing out like clumsy toothpaste. I was twelve, and the task was simple: extend the flower bed border. My father, an engineer, had shown me the process—the dampening of the brick, the hawk of mortar, the tap of the trowel handle to set it true. But my line veered, a gentle serpentine curve where there should have been stern Euclidean rectitude.

I stood back, hot and frustrated, ready for the lesson on precision. He studied it, his silence stretching. Then he said, ‘Well, now we have to follow it.’ He didn’t mean follow it as in replicate the mistake. He meant we had to commit to its new, emergent logic. The next brick had to meet the last one where it actually was, not where the plan said it should be. Our audience—this growing wall—had spoken. It had a shape of its own, and our job was no longer to impose a design, but to listen and build upon what was already there.

The First Curve

I’ve thought of that crooked line every time I’ve tried to ‘build an audience.’ We start with such clean diagrams: identify a niche, craft a value proposition, post consistently, engage. It’s a straight line drawn in the mind’s eye. But the first real readers—those first few bricks—never land exactly where you aimed. They come for a reason slightly adjacent to your intent. They linger on a footnote you considered deleting. They ask a question about a minor character, utterly ignoring your thematic grandstanding.

That’s your first curve. That’s the mortar squeezing out sideways. The amateur impulse, my twelve-year-old impulse, is to see it as failure, to scrap it and start over with tighter control. The craft, however, lies in the perception shift my father modeled: this isn’t a ruin of the plan; it *is* the plan now. Your audience is building itself, and it is showing you its inherent shape.

To follow the line is to lean into that adjacency. It means writing the next piece that answers that surprising question, or delving deeper into that footnote. It means allowing the collective curiosity of those first few hundred to pull your work into a shape you couldn’t have drafted alone. Their aggregated presence—their clicks, their comments, their quiet subscriptions—becomes the true guideline. You are not laying a railroad track; you are dry-stone walling a path up a hill, each stone finding its purchase on the ones below.

The wall in the backyard ended up being my favorite part of the garden. The curve created a small, sheltered nook that caught the afternoon sun, a perfect spot for a single lavender plant. It had a personality the straight sections lacked. Our early audiences are like that. The path they carve for you feels crooked because it is alive, responsive to the actual terrain of human interest, not the graph paper of a content strategy.

The editorial craft, then, isn’t just in the initial laying of the brick. It’s in the practiced eye that can distinguish between a mistake that weakens the structure and a deviation that *becomes* the structure. It’s the humility to let the line lead, and the skill to build upon it with integrity, so that what emerges, though unplanned, stands solid and true, a shelter you didn’t know you were building.

Notes & further reading

A few pages I came back to while writing this: